This is embarrassing and supercilious. The alarm-bells began to ring from the point at which I realised that the author thought too much of himself to bother t

This is embarrassing and supercilious. The alarm-bells began to ring from the point at which I realised that the author thought too much of himself to bother to actually engage with any post-modernist. It's easy to impute a series of highly contrived 'rhetorical manoeuvres' to someone if you don't do the hard work of unpacking their thought. As for the substantive first-order claims, it's hard to know where to even start. The author describes the 'troll's truism' as an equivocal statement that rides on a truism to make wild claims that it cannot in fact support. When the wild claim is pushed, the proponent retreats to the truism. The truism here is social constructivism, and the wild claim that illicitly rides on this truism is the denial of a mind-independent world. First of all, I don't know in what possible sense social constructivism is a 'truism'. It only rose to any kind of institutional prominence during the 'linguistic turns' of the 20th century. And it probably remains - in philosophy departments, certainly - a minority position. I suppose that perhaps depends on what one takes to be social constructivism; but the brevity of the author's treatment does not allow for this kind of basic detail. The statement quoted from Fish is not 'trivial' in the least. Second, the real question is the one that Wittgenstein struggled with between his early and late works: is language a device with a single veracious use for the naming of objects in the world, or is it something that is defined by its use as a protean tool of social communication among humans groups through historical time. I have never since any convincing response to Wittgenstein's defence of the latter in the Philosophical Investigations. And if that follows then, whether one has the ontological view that a mind-independent world exists, one is nevertheless committed to a form of linguistic contextualism, i.e. a given statement only has force relative to the criteria of language-use that prevails in the particular social context in which one is speaking. But the author simply collapses the ontological admission of a mind-independent world into an admission that linguistic contextualism has no epistemological purchase - which is completely not the case. I can't be bothered to sift through the rest of the paper. The treatment of Foucault is especially vacuous. P.S. I am not a post-modernist.